Online modes for the majority of Ubisoft games will be impacted next week when the company moves its gaming servers. PC and Mac gamers will find several games completely unavailable online and offline. Ubisoft will start transitioning its online services from next Tuesday, 7th February. PC games scheduled to go dark include Tom Clancy’s HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7. Mac gamers will lose access to Assassin’s Creed, Splinter Cell Conviction and The Settlers.

Uplay on PC will fall offline completely, although other PC games not mentioned above will remain playable offline if already connected at least once.

Top titles Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and Driver: Francisco will remain playable online throughout the server move across PC and all console platforms.

Just Dance 3 on Xbox 360 and The Settlers Online on PC will also be unaffected.

All other Ubisoft games will have their online modes "impacted" during the maintenance, the company has warned.

Ubisoft did not mention how long the work would last.

Source: EuroGamer

This Saturday the 28,000 members of this Steam group are planning to play Half-Life 2 together.

The group hopes that the massive play session will shoot Half-Life 2 up the Steam most-played list and let Valve know how many people are still waiting for Half-Life 2: Episode 3. Valve certainly know this already, and probably receive dozens of emails but the group hopes to deliver the message in a more appreciative way.

“Instead of focusing efforts in a negative and disrespectful way, we have decided to gain Valve’s attention by delivering a basic message: Your oldest and longest running fanbase would like better communication,” they say on the Steam group page.

Event is set to kick off at 7PM GMT / 11AM PST this Saturday.

Update #1:

First invite went to LTChaosLT. Congrats! Round two coming very soon…

Update #2:

We want you to make up a short story, leave a comment below or send us a direct message on our Twitter. We’ll pick the best story and post it here for everyone to read. GO!

Second winner is: Cake for this short story.

Gabe Newell said that it’s going to be a great addition and was a result of many direct requests from their customers.

“The Steam app comes from many direct requests from our customers,” he said

“Seeing which of your friends are online and playing a game, sending quick messages, looking at screenshots for an upcoming game, or catching a sale – these are all features customers have requested. Mobile is changing way people interact, play games and consume media, and the Steam app is part of our commitment to meet customer demands and expand the service functionality of Steam to make it richer and more accessible for everyone” Newell added.

We’ll be giving away 3 Steam Mobile invites later today!

The only bad thing is you need an invite:

Hey guess what!? Now European Wikipedia (after the US Wikipedia yesterday) will have to demonstrate another blackout pretty soon. The plan is simple, sometime in January 2012 most of European Union countries is probably going to sign the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a very controversial international agreement aimed at extermination of piracy and counterfeiting. Information about the date of signing the agreement comes from different rumors on the Internet.

ACTA does not have a good opinion among analysts. This document is accused of imposing the American way of thinking about intellectual property and is often considered to be harmful to innovation in the countries of the Old Continent.

As usual when it comes to censorship all the meetings were held behind closed doors, and after finishing it all in 2010 a document was presented as something beneficial for the economy and of copyright, which you just quickly sign.

The agreement is to have an impact not only on piracy on the Internet, but also on technological progress broadly understood, and even the drug trade.

ACTA protects intellectual property in an aggressive manner and harmful to third parties. The word “industry” is used very often, but there are no mentions of citizen rights.

The definition of commercial-scale infringement of intellectual property in the ACTA is wider than the current law, and according to some may lead to the recognition of journalists as criminals.

Innovation can be risky in financial terms, and for that ACTA may re-build the walls there, where a compromise has been achieved (World Trade Organisation, World Intellectual Property Organization, the TRIPS Agreement and other). The agreement may involve ISPs in the fight against piracy, which could lead to blocking of some services and monitoring of traffic, thus limiting communication and violation of privacy of subscribers. Yet, despite numerous appeals of non-governmental organizations (for example, Internet Society and Panoptykon) nor the Polish  government (and other countries I bet) nor the European Parliament does not even mention a word about the consequences of signing the agreement.

More over, The EU Parliament has not even published a commentary and opinion about ACTA and despite the impact of drugs on the market have not examined the text of the commission on health care in the EU. Despite this the act is going to be signed next week (probably).

We’ll be following ACTA news from now on.

Source: DobreProgramy

Hi guys!

I just have a short announcement to all of you posting on our forums.

Please do not call any CD-Key store/seller/company a scammer, fraud or thief without providing any actual evidence. Feel free to post screenshots of your chats with them, PayPal transfers, messages, e-mails etc.

That would be all. From now on if you post something please think twice before calling someone names.

If you were planning to buy Anno 2070, you should know that it is limited to only 3 activations and if you replace your, say, graphics card more than thrice, you can say goodbye to the game.

What exactly is Ubisoft’s thought process behind such a strategy for the PC market?

Yes, we know they have been talking about how piracy is rampant, and how almost “95% of the PC gamers would pirate it” anyway, and other nonsense. This to us, shows an utter lack of respect for the PC market, and while plenty of publishers are affected by piracy, they have shown us that there is a way to succeed and gain a lot of goodwill in the process.

Guru3D found out about Anno 2070′s DRM, Ubisoft’s response to that was… well, terrible.

They said:

“Sorry to disappoint you – the game is indeed restricted to 3 hardware changes and there simply is no way to bypass that. We also do not have 7 copies of the game for you.”

Source: GamingBolt

During 2011 the platform grew to offer over 1,800 games to over 40 million accounts. Year-over-year unit sales increased by more than 100% for the seventh straight year, and during the 2011 Holiday Sale Steam’s simultaneous user number eclipsed the 5 million player mark.                      
 
Meanwhile Steam doubled the amount of content delivered in 2011 vs. 2010, serving over 780 Petabytes of data to gamers around the world. To meet the increasing demand for games and services on the platform, the Steam infrastructure more than doubled its service capacity and a new content delivery architecture was deployed to improve user download rates.
 
Over 14.5 mil copies of Steamworks games were registered during the year, a 67% increase over 2010. Steamworks titles shipped during 2011 include The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and more. Since the suite of services was released three years ago, Steamworks has shipped in over 400 games.
 
"Steam and Steamworks continues to evolve to keep up with customer and developer demands for new services and content," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "Support for in-game item trading prompted the exchange of over 19 million items. Support for Free to Play (FTP) games, launched in June, has spurred the launch of 18 FTP titles on Steam, with more coming in 2012. Looking forward, we are preparing for the launch of the Big Picture UI mode, which will allow gamers to experience Steam on large displays and in more rooms of the house."

Source: TGX

You can now blind pre-order Indie Royale’s New Year’s Bundle – which includes PC and Mac versions of all games – at a recommended €/£/$5 to €/£/$10 USD contribution, and aminimum of $3.99 USD.

The titles to be offered will include a premium blend of FPS and RTS (Steam for PC and Mac), an innovative single-player puzzle game (Steam for PC and Mac, Desura for PC, DRM-free PC and Mac download), an award-winning 2D platformer (Steam for PC and Mac, plus an enhanced version for Desura PC, DRM-free PC and Mac download) and a world premiere on PC/Mac for an acclaimed arcade shooter with a twist (Desura for PC, DRM-free PC and Mac download).

Those who optionally pre-order now will get game access as soon as the bundle launches, lock in their price, and receive as a bonus George & Jonathan’s raved-about electronic chiptune funk album ‘Beautiful Lifestyle’ (this bonus is also available to those who pay more than the minimum price during the bundle.)

The New Year’s Bundle will launch fully later this week at $2.99 USD and up – watch our Twitter feed or Facebook page for immediate notice at launch time.

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